The Center for Evidenced-based Security Research (CESR) is a joint
project among researchers at UC San
Diego, the International
Computer Science Institute,
and New York University. This
interdisciplinary effort takes the view that, while security is a
phenomenon mediated by the technical workings of computers and
networks, it is ultimately a conflict driven by economic and social
issues that merit a commensurate level of scrutiny. As a result, our
goal is to tackle key social and economic elements of security: how
the motivations and interactions of attackers, defenders, and users
shape the threats we face, how they evolve over time, and how they can
best be addressed. Our NSF proposal, "Beyond
Technical Security: Developing an Empirical Basis for
Socio-Economic Perspectives", details the scope and efforts of our
project.